Ramlila

Lila is a theological word before it is a theatrical one: the play of God, the divine activity that creates and sustains worlds without need or effort. Calling these performances Ramlila therefore makes a claim, that when the epic is enacted, Rama's play is present, not represented, and the tradition takes the claim seriously.

The boys chosen to embody Rama, his wife Sita and his brothers are called svarupas, forms of the deity; for the duration of the cycle they are treated with the honours of temple images, garlanded, saluted and carried, and the evening's performance commonly closes with arati, the lamp offering, made to the crowned actors exactly as to icons.

The audience is a congregation. Spectators shout the victory of Rama at the high moments, and the sadhus who follow the great cycles attend as pilgrims. The text sung and spoken beneath the action is the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, whose verses a ramayani chants while the dialogues unfold, so the performance is simultaneously a recitation of scripture and its enactment. The cycle's shape follows the epic: exile, abduction, the search, the war before Lanka, and at Dussehra the victory, when towering bamboo-and-paper effigies of Ravana, his brother and his son, packed with fireworks, burn before enormous crowds, an image of evil consumed that has become one of the most recognisable religious spectacles in the world.

Ramlila is not one production but a landscape of them, from neighbourhood stages with amateur casts to the great civic cycles of the Gangetic towns, and UNESCO's inscription named the strongholds: Ramnagar and Varanasi, Vrindavan, Ayodhya, Sattna and Madhubani among them. Ramnagar is the tradition's benchmark. Under the patronage of the maharajas of Banaras since the early nineteenth century, its lila runs thirty-one days, and it stages the epic across the whole town: permanent sites stand in for Ayodhya, Janakpur, the forest, Lanka, and the audience migrates nightly with the story, tens of thousands walking from episode to episode behind the svarupas, so that watching becomes pilgrimage and the town becomes the epic's map.

The maharaja attends in state as the first servant of Rama, and the whole cycle proceeds without amplification, by lamplight and voice, a deliberate conservatism its devotees prize. Elsewhere the form has adapted freely: urban lilas use loudspeakers, film songs and professional troupes, diaspora communities from Trinidad to Fiji and Mauritius stage their own cycles, descendants of indentured labourers who carried the Ramcharitmanas with them, and television broadcasts of the epic sit alongside rather than replacing the live tradition. The common thread is participation: Ramlila is produced by committees of townspeople, funded by subscription, and acted largely by amateurs whose service is itself devotion, a civic liturgy in which a community annually retells the story by which it understands the victory of good.